Recently, home networking technologies have appeared that allow, for example, simultaneous, shared Internet access, printer/peripheral sharing, file and application sharing and networked gaming. In addition, these technologies allow consumers to enjoy the use of each of these home entertainment and information applications using existing wiring in the home. One of these home-networking technologies is promulgated by the Home Phone Network Alliance (“HPNA”). Other examples of home networking technologies also exist.
Home networking technologies generally use internal home wiring, such as a telephone line, to provide communication among devices located both inside and outside of the home. The telephone line may be, for example, a direct analog voice line. In another example, the telephone line may be an analog derived voice line, such as can be used to support Voice over ATM (“VoATM”), Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) or other digital technologies. HPNA systems may be designed to share the telephone line with standard analog plain old telephone system (“POTS”) service and asynchronous digital subscriber line service (“ADSL”).
A home may have one or more telephone lines, such as one or more copper pairs. Each telephone line may provide a separate connection, such as to a central office (“CO”), and one or more devices may be connected to each telephone line. Although a home may include more than one telephone line, current HPNA systems are only designed to function over a single POTS line. Thus, a first device connected to one of the home telephone lines could not use these home network technologies to communicate with a second device connected a different home telephone line.
Therefore, there exists a need to provide an improve system and method for allowing a single device to share multiple transmission lines.